Not all reputation management and customer experience solutions provide options for quick and easy survey questions. If you are lucky enough to ask your customers focused questions it can be difficult to decide what to ask, especially without asking too many questions. There are some easy general go-to’s such as customer service, communication and results. But these are gut reactions.
Wouldn’t it be better to ask questions based on data from actual customer experiences and what they care about?
Using Your Review History To Guide Future Success
Good news, you can build out a set of survey questions that hit upon the most impactful elements of your business by using your past online reviews. First, we monitor and ingest your entire history of reviews from every channel you monitor with us. Google reviews, Facebook, the BBB, Trip Advisor and your industry review sites are all brought into our platform.
Next our Insights Report that uses artificial intelligence from IBM Watson to give sentiment and reputation impact analysis to the most important keywords used within your reviews.
The Insights Report identifies keywords being mentioned most often within your reviews along with their impact, meaning “do these terms elevate your reputation or bring it down?”. Terms mentioned most are areas of importance or concern to your customers combined with seeing how these keywords impact your ratings.
Don’t Take Too Long With Highly Rated Tacos
Let’s look at an example of a Mexican restaurant. The Impact chart from our Insights report highlights that the keyword “time” is appearing frequently in low rated reviews with a negative impact on our reputation.
When we view the sentiment section, we see that “time” and “minute” appear frequently with over 270 mentions, usually with poor sentiment. If you are taking too long to prepare those highly loved tacos, you are delivering a poor experience.
This guides us in creating a survey question on the “Speed of Service” so we can benchmark how they are doing and work to improve it.
Another scenario that comes up often is “order.” This guides us that a question around the accuracy of their order is key to a great experience. The Impact chart shows us that when “order” is in a review, that review averages just a 2.5-star rating, well below our brand average of a 4.2-star rating.
Keep in mind, if you are seeing many similar words mentioned it might make sense to create two survey questions around that topic to hone in on what is driving the experience.
We can also see that our exceptional experiences include reviews with “margaritas” and “great tacos” both appearing in reviews above our brand average of 4.2 stars. Reviews that contain these terms are averaging 4.4 stars and 4.6 stars, positively impacting our reputation and rating.
Asking a survey question on our food quality, even though it seems to be a strong point, is valuable as these items are key to a 5-star experience. We want to make sure that our strengths stay strong as this shows it’s important to exceeding our customer’s expectations.
Survey Questions Based On What Matters To Customers
Thanks to our learnings and insight above, here is the survey built out. A quick five questions that will capture Net Promoter Score, speed, quality, order accuracy and their 1st-party review.
It can also be helpful to incorporate any changes into your survey questions. Asking survey questions about a change in product or service offerings can provide valuable insight about specific changes. This allows you to quickly adapt and report customer sentiment about these changes and ultimately decide if these are permanent or temporary changes.
Our Success Report is just one report that helps you track your performance across our customer experience metrics including your survey questions.
Data-based Decisions Over Guesses
Lastly, if there are particular parts of the business that you are not finding in the Insights Report customers may not be thinking about this as part of their experience. It’s certainly not influencing them enought to write a review and that can be telling in itself.
As a bonus in the review request process, putting topic at the top of their minds using the survey questions might increase it’s mentions. These mentions can provide you with valuable marketing opportunities in Google search results and on your site if you’re utilizing our review widgets.
Turning Insights To Survey Questions
This process is incredibly helpful for bigger brands with many locations and a large number of reviews already. While even dozens of reviews for a small business can point you in the right direction, hundreds and thousands of reviews will produce very clear results. To get started on this process:
- Add all of your possible review sites to GatherUp for monitoring
- Access the Insights Report (allow 48 hours after new review sites have been added)
- Identify your important terms using the Impact chart and sentiment section of the Insights Report
- Build your survey questions
You now have built a smarter survey based on what your customers have already informed you they care about.
